Readme.txt

* The Ticket to Easy Street?
* Scott Hankins, Mark Hoekstra, Paige Skiba
* April 12 2010

/* 
These files will assist in the replication the paper
if you have any questions, please contact me
* Scott Hankins
* University of Kentucky
* scott.hankins@gmail.com

*/

The dataset (lottery_bankruptcy_anoymous.dta) included contains Florida lottery winners linked to 
phonebook and bankruptcy records as described in the paper.

Due to privacy restrictions, the names and bankruptcy case ids have been stripped out.


There are 3 Stata (version 10) do files and 1 SAS file included for the paper "The Ticket to Easy Street"
1- lotto.sas reads the downloaded lottery data into SAS
2- bkcyread.do reads the SAS data into Stata

3- bank1.do is only useful for someone who wishes to "start from the beginning" in replicating this paper (see below).
  - it merges the 3 datasets together

4- bank2.do replicates all results and graphs in the paper with the included dataset.


************************
If someone wishes to "start at the beginning", the following specifications
can be used to acquire the data.
1- Florida lottery data is available for a nominal charge at http://www.flalottery.com

2- The bankruptcy data is available on PACER (http://pacer.psc.uscourts.gov)
  - the date range looked up is Jan/02/1985 - Nov/23/2007 (note: this whole range was not used in the paper)
  - see bankruptcy readme for more details

3- To match names to phone numbers, a Ruby script (referenceusa.rb) was used
  - see http://www.ruby-lang.org/ to get started with Ruby
  - note: all unique first name, last name and county combinations were looked up using this script.

**************************

We are willing to share both the lottery, bankruptcy and phonebook data with individual
researchers for replication purposes, so long as they do not post the data online, etc. 
Thus, so long as researchers sign an agreement promising only to use the data for replication
purposes and not make it available to anyone else, we can provide all of the source data
and code used for our entire analysis.

